[attach id=256806 size="medium"]Jason Micallef. Photo: Jason Borg[/attach]
There was no conflict of interest in Jason Micallef’s role as chairman of Labour television station and that of Valletta Foundation, a spokesman for the Prime Minister said yesterday.
“The two roles are completely different,” the spokesman said.
The reply tallied with Mr Micallef’s comments that he did not feel there was any conflict of interest in the two positions.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said that Mr Micallef would eventually resign his One chairmanship once he took over V-18 on a full-time basis.
Commenting on reports that Where’s Everybody director and television presenter Lou Bondì had been approached to form part of the V-18 board, the Prime Minister’s spokesman said: “Various people are approached for different roles and any announcements will be made public at the opportune time.”
A conflict of interest is a conflict of interest
When contacted, Mr Bondì said that he would rather not comment.
In an interview on the Newsbook website last Sunday, Mr Micallef repeatedly and strongly denied that Mr Bondì would be part of his team.
Times of Malta asked ethics professor Kenneth Wain whether he felt there was need for a code of ethics that could serve as guidelines for public posts to avoid situations of conflict of interest.
“A conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. You don’t need to include it in a code of ethics. Everybody knows that conflict of interest is unethical,” he replied.
Without wanting to go into the case of Mr Micallef, he said there would be instances where there was a clear conflict.
“You can’t ever have a code of ethics that is so specific that all you need to do is refer to it and that’s it,” he said, adding that the interpretation of principles would always be “open to interpretation”.
According to Prof Wain, the most important thing is “public consciousness” of ethical behaviour in public life.
“It is important that we should have proper ethical behaviour. It depends on people being responsible rather than having watchdogs,” he said.
In his view, we should aim for a society where people are “mature enough” to be able to identify conflicts of interest and take their own steps to ensure that this is prevented.